


Hero Of War

by comicroute



Series: A Series Of Historical Events [1]
Category: Batman (Comics), Robin: Son of Batman (Comics)
Genre: Afghanistan, Gen, Historical Accuracy, Introspection, no capes AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-14 00:23:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11196582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/comicroute/pseuds/comicroute
Summary: Dick knew the scene out there was brutal, but he went anyway. To defend his country. To stop terrorism in its tracks. To make sure his friends and family at home never have to fear stepping outside. He didn’t expect to meet a little boy just as scared as he is. He didn’t expect war to be as grey as this.





	Hero Of War

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Roy Harper might seem OOC, depending on what version of him you're looking at. It might seem like he's some evil man, but he's not. Just one that's experienced too much.
> 
> Disclaimer: Although I’m an avid history student, I did NOT serve in this war. Details have been taken or been inspired by the accounts of soldiers who served. I'm not going to pretend to understand what these soldiers go through, but this is as close as I'll probably ever get. 
> 
> This entire issue is very important to me, as my family is currently in the Middle East. They're not yet caught up in all this, but every day is just an inch closer... And I decided that I might as well put something on paper if I'm already going to think about it so much.
> 
> Warnings: Sensitive content in the form of references to 9/11 and...literally everything surrounding the controversial American involvement in Afghanistan.
> 
> Song: Hero Of War by Rise Against

**She walked through bullets and haze,**

**I asked her to stop, I begged her to stay,**

**But she pressed on, so I lifted my gun**

**And I fired away.**

**And the shells jumped through the smoke,**

**And into the sand that the blood now had soaked.**

**She collapsed with a flag in her hand.**

**A flag white as snow.**

* * *

Dick can’t remember his name now, but one of the other Special Forces officers has a family member in New York. It isn’t spectacular or unique, a lot of the guys with Dick have family members in New York. It’s why they’re here.

Dick doesn’t. He has family in Gotham, though, and everyone’s always saying how it’s just like New York, enough so that when Dick goes to sleep the night the officer shows them all the piece of one of the towers his sister sent him, he pictures the highest building in Gotham, which so happens to be the Wayne Enterprises building in Old Town. He pictures it there, and then the next moment not. He pictures it on the news in some outlandish scenario where he’s just woken up and there it is, with a plane sticking out of it.

The officer shows them the piece and then he cuts it up and hands it out to whoever agrees to help him bury it. In a way, he wants to bring them all closer to home. New York isn’t Dick’s home (in a way, neither is Gotham -- Dick’s home travels, and right now it’s in France), but in this moment he feels like it is, just like how his bunk mate from Missouri feels like it’s his home as well.

They’re in Kabul within a few days, and Wally reminds Dick about the American Embassy located there. “Deserted back in...hell, 1989? Something or another,” West says as he explains how he wants to bury their piece of the tower there. Dick agrees, so he and West and Harper and Kent all go to the Embassy. They poke their heads around a bit but eventually settle on the flagpole, and maybe Dick expected something more to it. A little more fanfare, or maybe some sort of spiritual awakening. But in the end, all they do is bury some piece of scrap metal into dirt that’s simultaneously both too loose and too hard and too damn hot. They mark the spot on a map, they give the coordinates to the rest of the guys and they mumble something about giving a copy to someone back home. Maybe the police or fire departments. None of them know why it feels so important, but it is. And yet, at the same time, it’s still nothing but metal and dirt.

He’s been here a year. It’s 2009 and it feels like time is moving so fast and so slow, but Dick doesn’t know if he wants to go home. He knows he doesn’t _like_ being here, seeing the medic who has trained for who knows how long amputate a leg for the first time on nothing but some guy’s blanket over dry dirt near the kitchen, where West is hovering and Harper is drinking like he doesn’t expect to wake up tomorrow. But he doesn’t know what he’d do once he got there. He thinks of the empty, spotless manor, and after getting so used to all his sweat and West’s sweat and mud streaked so consistently across his hands and face that he doesn’t bother trying to scrape any of it off anymore, he just feels itchy. Uncomfortable.

It’s scary to think that it’s a relief for him, for the medics, that it was only yesterday that the new staff amputated a guy’s leg for the first time, because it was their first casualty. It’s terrifying that it’s a relief because they’ve been shooting for weeks now, and there have been casualties. But they haven’t been American. And as far as Dick’s aware, they haven’t been Taliban either.

Phase three of the war started shortly before Dick was brought to the front. Troop presence has been intensifying all over the area to protect the civilian population from Taliban attacks, although Dick can’t see it first hand because he’s been stationed over only the nearby town for a while now. They’re scouting out a member they think is Taliban, and they think this because apparently Kent is scarily good at Arabic and picked up a friend along the way. That friend has posing as Taliban (or maybe just a normal Arab soldier, Dick doesn’t speak enough Arabic to pose as anything but a tourist and isn’t afraid to admit that he hardly pays enough attention to what other units do to tell the difference -- he takes orders, and that’s as much as he cares to do) over the radios, since apparently the North Alliance soldiers have these fancy walkie-talkies and they know all the Taliban’s frequencies, and they’re narrowing in on a suspect.

They’re supposed to move in a few hours. Harper has a potential concussion from hitting his head on the corner of a table while stumbling around piss drunk last night, and all West is doing is laughing at him.

“First death of our group is gonna be Harper’s dumb ass getting drunk enough to walk into a landmine,” West says with not an ounce of mercy for Harper’s incessant grumbling.

“I don’t think you need to be drunk to walk into a landmine,” Dick points out. “Not with the number of them around here.”

“You’re right. You just need to be named Harper.”

“Well, there’s a reason to want to get here as quick as possible if there ever was one,” Harper says, responding to Dick and smoothly ignoring West. “The freedom to be drunk without worrying about getting your dick blown off.”

“Of course, that’s the only body part you care about,” says West, unconcerned with the cold shoulder.

“Only body part worth caring about if you ask me,” replies Harper. “Come back missing a limb or two? No biggy, chalk it all up to another epic war story for the ladies. Come back missing your dick? Fuck looking brave, ladies ain’t gonna come near you with a ten foot pole.”

“Booze and cheap fucks,” muses West. “When did you become your old man?”

Harper doesn’t reply, which causes Dick to glance at him curiously. He’s frozen, with his face twisted up in something like disgust. “Oh god,” he says. “Never say that again. I’m already going to need therapy when I get back, don’t make it worse.”

They’re going through the town now, and it’s essentially deserted. That’s not new. The moment anyone sees Americans coming they shut their doors tight, maybe put up a chair or two against it, or they drag their kids to hide behind their skirts. They don’t have expressions of fear so much as caution, which Dick doesn’t understand. He’s here to help, they’re here to help. They’re risking their lives away from home to stop terrorists that endanger these people’s lives as well as Americans, and his frustration mounts every time dark brown eyes stare at him with those expressions that aren’t necessarily blank, but nonetheless so incredibly difficult to read.

He feels trapped in a cage sometimes when he looks into those eyes, because he doesn’t know what to say, since he can’t say anything that they would understand anyway. It’s not totally the language barrier either. He thinks that if they spoke English, they still wouldn’t understand his mission, and that’s the most frustrating thing of all.

Olsen is the one who kicks in the door, yelling commands and then it’s a rush of adrenaline from there. They barge in, but Dick stays back, and he hears the yell of a woman and the scream of a child but drowning all of that are the curses, the spits and mocking laughter spewing from the lips of people Dick knows by name. West walks out looking impassive, Harper looks pissed, and behind them Olsen and Smith drag a man Dick can’t see the face of out of the house. They toss him on the ground. When they turn him around, his black unkempt beard has turned a lighter shade from the dirt in it, and he attempts to spit mud out of his mouth until Smith kicks him a good one in the gut, and then it’s just wheezing from there, with a background cacophony of cries behind them where Dick refuses to look. A boy runs out from the door, almost makes it to the feet of the man until a woman is running out after him and dragging him back harshly by the arm. But the boy stays at close as he can and he refuses his mother's attempts to hide him. He keeps them wide open and takes it all in.

“Christ, stop, stop!” West shouts, but Olsen waves him off and he gives up, stands back and watches, gritting his teeth. Harper is there, but further forward and he’s kicking too, yelling expletives at this man Dick can’t recall the name of, some supposed Talibani and Harper is irate, beyond reason. He lands one on the man’s ribs, the man who’s twisting like a fish out of water, and Dick knows. He knows what happened to Harper before Dick joined him and West. Harper’s been here the longest of them all and this man must have caused him personal grief. Or maybe Harper is simply using him as a figurehead to take the fall for someone else that is out of his reach.

He knows Harper had a little girl back there. In New York.

Dick meets West’s eyes and wonders when the boy not old enough to drink started looking so sad. They only get sadder when they hear about the next door neighbour who escaped in the confusion, and that the man they beat black and blue and left writhing in the dirty, empty street was the wrong one.

* * *

 

 They run into a suicide bomber.

Dick is ahead, West and Harper taking up the rear. They’ve been inseparable for a while now. They have to stay on the move, because there’s a barrage of bullets relentlessly beating against the walls to their right. Dick doesn’t know where they are right now. A hallway of some sort. Whatever it is, it has a wall and an attempted cover overhead and some stalls to the left, so it must be a market of some sort, or at least used to be. The stalls are empty and whatever cloth was supposed to provide cover from the sky has been torn apart.

Dick sees the familiar woman first and stops cold in his tracks. She’s staring at him intently, and Dick wants to go to her and talk her down and tell her to get to safety, but she’s reaching into the folds of her clothes and he panics. He panics and his finger has been on the trigger this whole time and all he can think about is West behind him who hasn’t seen the woman yet, who keeps talking about the girl he’s got back home who just made it into Stanford. He opens fire before he realises that his fingers have curled in his anxiety.

The woman goes down, and it’s only her black clothing that stops Dick from seeing the blood at first. But eventually it pools out around her and Harper is shouting. He runs up beside Dick and stares down at this woman and asks what the hell just happened, why did Dick shoot, but it sounds like everything is coming from six feet underwater. West looks a little green around the mouth. Harper walks up to her and puts a hand on her stomach and it’s her stomach, Dick can see from how the clothes flatten to press around a petite waist. It’s her actual stomach, not hidden gear, that Harper’s hand presses against. Dick doesn’t need to hear it. He doesn’t want to hear it. West looks shaken. He’s only a little older than Dick but Dick feels older than him and he wants to make sure the kid stays safe because he knows, even if West doesn’t think he knows, even if Harper hasn’t confirmed it yet, that the kid never keeps a finger on the trigger.

Dick stumbles maybe a few steps and pukes. In the end, more tears end up mixing in the dirt than anything else.

They did find an AK-47 at her hip, but it jammed when they tried to shoot it.

* * *

“What are you doing?”

The boy looks evenly at him. Or maybe not. He has that look in his eyes, of fierce determination mixed with that caution, that unexpressed fear in the eyes of everyone else with such dark irises.

He has a gun strapped around his shoulder, in his hands, bulky and weighing him down and maybe as tall, or taller, than he is.

Dick also has his hands on his gun, but he doesn’t want to. He’s scared to put his finger on the trigger and he’s scared to take it off. Scared with the way this kid is looking at him, with so much more behind him than behind Dick. And Dick wonders, briefly and maybe a little hysterically, what this boy has to go back to. How desperately he wants the American to get out, compared to how desperately the Americans want to stay in. The sides aren’t well balanced. Dick doesn’t have the same stakes.

“Why do you want me dead?” Dick asks, maybe a little desperately. He doesn’t know much Arabic. _“ >Please<.” _

It takes a long moment. A long silence. _“ >What do you plead for?<” _the boy asks, and Dick gets the gist of it, but he doesn’t know how to respond. It’s always been easier to understand than to speak.

 _“ >Please. Why?<” _ The boy looks so angry by that answer that Dick feels his heart in his throat. _“ >I...here to help. Me. Us. Why don’t you like us?<” _

But there’s no time to wait for an answer. There’s an explosion that throws air into Dick’s face, blows the hair out of the boy’s, and both of them make the mistake of looking in that direction. Yet, the boy must see something that Dick doesn’t. He remains frozen when Dick has already shaken it off, so he dives forward, praying to any higher force in existence not to abandon him now. The boy remains clutching his weapon but Dick still manages to wrap his arm around his small waist and tuck him under his arm, enough to dive out of the way of the shower of bullets and debris that rain down on them like Armageddon.

The gun gets tossed out of the boy’s hands when they dive, but it’s strapped around his chest so all it does is get swung around to his back, the barrel of it pressing up against Dick’s stomach. Dick’s gun was dropped without a strap to keep it on his person.

The boy struggles, screaming and cursing, and Dick turns on the safety of his rifle before releasing him. He spins around and clutches his gun again to find Dick on his knees, his own gun now probably buried in the displaced dirt back on the street.

And...Dick doesn’t find the black eyes that he was expecting, that he’s seen in everyone else’s faces. He finds blue eyes, blue like the sky, like Bruce and Harper and...himself. Blue eyes like his own eyes, staring right back at him like some twisted reflection.

 _“ >How can you not know?<” _ the boy yells at him, kicking at the dirt, his knuckles white, his cheeks streaked with tears. _“ >How can you be so blind?<” _

“I’m sorry,” he says. It’s in English, but the boy seems to understand anyway. His lips twist into a snarl. _“ >We don’t mean to. Protection. Us, to you. From the terrorists.<” _

_“ >How, when the only terrorist I see is you?<” _

Dick feels like he can’t breathe.

 _“ >There is nothing you want here. There is nothing we can give you. Leave. Leave! They left. They all left. The men you want are gone!<” _ the boy screams in anguish. He marches up to Dick. Dick tries to spring to his feet, but the boy drops the gun and swings it around to his back again. Instead, he punches Dick in the chest. With the armor and the dramatic difference in size between them, it isn’t the slightest bit powerful. He doesn’t think it’s meant to be. But the boy punches him again. Then again, and again, and again. _“ >Do you understand me now? They left long ago, but how can we tell you that when we don’t know when they’ll be back? Or when they will find out what we say? Do you understand me now?<” _

_“ >Why won’t you help us? Why hurt us? We won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt us.<” _Dick asks. He doesn’t want to argue. He wants to understand, but the more the boy talks, the more confused Dick becomes.

The boy stops punching him. He takes a step back and takes in Dick’s image, dirty and sweaty and kneeling.

 _“ >Why would I help the men who killed my mother?<” _ he says, clutching the rifle with him again, the same way Dick used to clutch his blanket. The sun is hot, beating down on his shoulders like an iron brand. The air is thick. It settles heavily on Dick’s tongue, in his throat and at the very bottom of his lungs, filling them like water. _“ >You’re here to fight your enemy, but so am I.<” _

* * *

Dick was in Afghanistan for seven months after that. The moment he got home he was forced to a therapist, who diagnosed him with PTSD prior to meeting him. He resigned from the army shortly afterwards.

West went back to Keystone. He resigned too, but a year after Dick. He heard a rumour about being drafted again, and that’s when he realised he had no spirit left for warfare. He quit out of fear of being sent back and was employed at the CCPD as their top forensic specialist. They saw each other again two years after Afghanistan, when Harper located both of them on Facebook and they remembered that Facebook is actually a thing.

The three of them meet in San Diego for Independence Day because it’s a better place than Gotham and a less boring place than Keystone, only to find out that they both work for the police, with Dick aiming for detective. Harper is the odd one out. He remains employed only by the Armed Forces. Neither of them ask why but they can guess, especially after he suggests skipping the live fireworks show. Instead, they all gather around on the couches in his apartment and watch the exploding colours with beers in all of their hands and banter on their lips like they never left each other’s company.

During that visit, Dick talks the most about Jason, the brother he met for the first time when he had just gotten back from Afghanistan. He doesn’t mention how much the fiery and temperamental teenager reminds him of another boy Dick met, with the way Jason remains cautious of every new person and has a habit of hoarding food and treats real guns with the same indifference that he treats violent video games. He doesn’t say how Jason reminds him most of this unnamed boy when he’s crying, because he cries only when he’s angry or frustrated, especially when someone misunderstands him. He lives every day like he’s preparing for a drone strike and he treats school like a warzone, with every student who looks at him sideways as a new enemy preparing for an attack and Jason is stuck deciding whether to be safe on the defensive or stop the threat before it happens by attacking first.

When he gets home again, he goes straight to see Jason. He makes sure to stop by twice a week and call regularly, so that he’s always there any time the kid might need him, might need a break from the landmines inside of his head -- because maybe, Dick might need that too.

Jason eventually meets Tim Drake, the next door neighbour, and then he doesn't need to spend as much time with Dick anymore. Suddenly, he has a friend closer to his own age. Dick doesn't know how he feels about it, because he's proud of Jason for this new development but he also feels like he's starting to be left behind, or maybe Jason is growing out of his 'phase' where he needs his older brother. A small corner of Dick's brain says that it isn't Jason who needs Dick, but Dick who needs Jason -- family to ground him to this reality and prevent his thoughts from sometimes drifting away from him. He finds that it's much harder to connect to the people around him now when it used to come so easily. No one else notices that anything about him has changed, other than him getting stricter or more serious in most things that he does. But he notices. He notices because it feels weird, like he isn't right in his own skin, and there's a thin film only slightly obscuring his view of the world where everyone else lives.

His worries are mostly unfounded. Jason is maybe more enthusiastic to spend time with him now because of Tim, since now he has someone to talk about, and apparently Tim knows all about Dick. Dick meets him and he gushes like a fanboy about events from over a decade ago instead of all the things that he imagines Dick must have done with a gun. He asks for all the details on different kinds of tours than what most people ask about, when Dick was wearing a leotard and the bright flashes of lights overhead were only lights. So when Jason's attention towards Tim starts to shift in a different direction than it had been originally, Dick welcomes it and welcomes the thought of having Tim around more in his life.

All three of them have gathered around to watch American Soldier in the manor’s theatre room when Dick makes a note not to let Jason pick out the next movie. Tim is fast asleep from having stayed up so late the night before to study. Jason is enraptured by the movie. Meanwhile, Dick leaves periodically (important phone call, bathroom break, popcorn, water) and he flinches at the gunshots but in the end, doesn’t shed a single tear. When the movie is over, Jason shuts off the TV with a flood of comments at the tip of his tongue (Dick thinks Jason could review movies for a living), but when he turns to Dick the only thing that comes out is: “What was Afghanistan like?”

Dick stares at the frozen frame on the television. He tries to think of an answer, and he tries hard because he’s been trying to come up with the perfect answer for years now. But he’s exhausted. It’s been a long day at work followed by a long afternoon of paperwork and it’s already edging towards midnight. He can’t think of an answer that might satisfy Jason's curiousity.

“Pointless,” he says in the end.

* * *

**A hero of war, is that what they see?**

**Just metals and scars, so damn proud of me.**

**And I brought home that flag, now it gathers dust.**

**But it's a flag that I love, it's the only flag I trust.**

 

**He said, "Son, have you seen the world?**

**Well what would you say,**

**if I said that you could?"**

 

**Author's Note:**

> The debate about war is a fascinating one, because it always leads to debates between interventionism and isolationism. I have some very passionate opinions on the matter of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, as I don’t totally align with either side. I want to clarify, however, that when Dick says ‘pointless’, he doesn’t mean that the cause is pointless. The intentions are well and stopping terrorism is a very important goal. However, he means pointless in the context of never ending. War is a cycle, and the war of terrorism is one with a hidden enemy, where all our well-meaning goals and morals are painted in shades of grey. It’s not like WWII, where we fought a clear enemy to stop people from being shoved into gas chambers. Instead, we’re strangers in a land that doesn’t want us there because we say we’re protecting them, yet we drop drones and bombs in places where we only think our enemy might be, and end up murdering hundreds upon thousands of civilians instead. And what purpose does that serve? I could go on forever, but this is a fanfiction and not a political debate, so don't be afraid to message me on Tumblr if you want to talk more!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and I hoped you enjoyed!


End file.
